The evolution of the Flash Platform has been an incredible display of growth and adaptation of a product. The Flash Platform, as most of us know, is now more than just simply vector animation software, and it has been fun to watch the Flash community shape the web with their endless creativity combined with the improved power of Actionscript and the technology around the Flash Player.

Flash is no longer just a tool for creating banner ads, and website intros. Today, it's a Platform that allows designers and developers alike to turn loose their creative instincts. While there are valid arguments for using other technologies in some cases, today, Flash is still the most versatile technology available for creating Rich Internet Applications.

From time to time, I run across articles that STILL talk about how bad Flash is for the web, and folks who STILL fault Adobe and the Flash Player for websites that have bad implementations, and SEO experts who STILL freak out when they see Flash on a website. It blows me away. Really.

Flash, as a technology, has come a long way in the last decade, and while it doesn't make sense in every situation, Flash is just a "given" in other situations. Below I've listed the cases or categories where Flash just makes sense on the web. I've also included a few examples of pretty good implementations (I would be willing to bet that these developers were glad they had the Flash player available in their bag of tricks). If I've forgotten any, feel free to call me out in the comments.

I noticed an issue a couple of days ago that prevented Firefox (Mac and Windows) from rendering a page of a site that I'm working on. I’m using CodeIgniter version 1.7.0. Initially, it appeared that any time I used the safe_mailto command from the CodeIgniter URL Helper class, Firefox wouldn't render the page.

Ok, after scratching my head for a while, I discovered that apparently there is some sort of conflict between the obfuscated mailto link and another script that is running on the page. I also have a script that executes client side when the page loads that will round the corners of a given div. When the mailto link is inside a div that is being “rounded”, it causes Firefox to hang. Bummer.

Moral of the story: if you need a safe_mailto link, design your page so that everything has right angle corners.

A library I use quite frequently in AS3 is as3corelib. This library was written by a few guys from Adobe and it provides an assortment of very useful AS3 classes. I recommend checking it out if you aren't already using it. If you've been under a rock, it has classes for encoding JPGs and PNGs. It has Array, Date, Dictionary, Int, Number, String, and XML utility classes. It has libraries for encoding and decoding JSON strings. Anyway, you get the point. I use the library often.

I did notice something the other day that I've been meaning to test. I finally got around to it this morning...

During the development of Flash Player 9 and 10, Adobe has made significant changes to their cross domain security. I've been doing some research on the changes Adobe has made over the last couple of days. This article describes the first major issue I've encountered with the new policy file requirements.

Policy files are used to allow SWFs on one domain (www.siteA.com), to access resources on another domain (www.siteB.com). They are the primary element of the permissions mechanism that the Flash Player uses to determine if a SWF file should have access to resources on a domain outside of the domain where the SWF is hosted. A policy file is a simple XML file that is typically placed at the root of a site (www.siteB.com/crossdomain.xml).

Do you sometimes scratch your head and ask WTF (I said "frick" in my head. Really.) when projects suddenly fall apart? Suppose you're a project manager. Your team is steadily moving along on a project. There is no indication that anything is wrong, and your team says they're on target to hit their deadlines. Then, all of the sudden, things seem to be out of control with the application, and there seems to be no explanation as to why everything is screwy. Everyone begins to panic towards the end. Features that should have been completed a long time ago still aren't working, developers are sweating profusely, and throwing up in the corner periodically. If your development team seems to have a hard time estimating tasks or consistently misses deadlines, then this article is for you.

Organization, consistency, and having realistic expectations are key to predicting more accurate timelines and avoiding unexpected last minute failures.

Read on.

I just read a little about the new beta technology that they have released today called Cocomo. It supposed to solve a bunch of problems, like "real-time social capabilities" and "real-time multi-user applications." Features of the Cocomo beta include things like whiteboards and chat.

Ok, Adobe. Help me out here. What's the point? Don't we already have all of those things in Flash Media Interactive Server and Livecycle Dataservices? What problem are you trying to solve exactly? The biggest difference I can see at first glance is that this is a hosted solution, but....we already have that too (ie Influxis). We've had the technology to build real-time apps with Flash and Flex for years now.

I'll investigate a little more, but man this seems a little redundant, and I definitely don't see the value here. Hopefully they aren't planning to ax FMS or LCDS. I would love to know more about where they are going with these different technologies. Sorry, I just don't understand the "big, big deal". They don't seem to compliment each other very well....they're almost in competition with themselves.

Off to learn more...

This is something that I've heard come up a lot in conversation and in a lot of different places across the web. Lee Brimlow brings up some interesting points in an article worth reading over at
The Flash Blog. Check it out. Flash is Not a Stepping Stone!